Oh, the things Darren Aronofsky does to his latest leading-lady turned muse, Jennifer Lawrence.

In “Mother!”, he keeps the camera in Lawrence’s face, on her shoulder and looking down her shirt as she is insulted, grabbed, pummeled and worse.

It’s a test that puts her character through hell fire and the Oscar winner herself through the acting version of that, playing a confused, tormented, enraged and ill-used wife and “Mother!” to that most monstrous of real-world monsters, the creative “genius.”

“Mother!” is a chaotic horror puzzle, “Rosemary’s Baby” by way of “La Dolce Vita” with images flirting with Dante’s “Inferno.” And if you’re not arguing with your date when you leave the theater, you’ve not been paying attention.

We meet the unnamed wife as she painstakingly renovates the striking, multi-storey old rural house that “the poet” calls home. Played by Javier Bardem with his usual Continental charm and hint of narcissistic menace, he has writer’s block and she lives only to ease him through this. She has made him a home, and figures she and she alone “is enough” for him.

Until a wheezing, sickly surgeon (Ed Harris) abruptly shows up and is just-as-abruptly invited to stay. The guy’s sexy harridan of a wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) rolls in. Then their two sons (Domhnall Gleeson, Brian Gleeson) arrive, mid-feud, and all hell breaks loose.

The wife entreats one and all to just leave. She’s had her daily dose of the powdered drink that keeps her going, she’s furious at her husband’s inconsideration and exhausted at constantly telling these nameless new house guests to not sit on that sink, “It’s not anchored,” to stay out of the poet’s study and to leave the precious jewel from his past in its holder. But nobody listens to her or respects her wishes.

The husband? He’s delighted to greet each perfunctory arrival — fresh faces telling him fresh stories. And if a little blood is spilled, if a death followed by a wake, filling their house with strangers, brings chaos, it’s enough for him that he’s got something to write about. It’s enough for his agent (Kristen Wiig), too.

Confused? The clues are in the dialogue — the guest she asks “Who ARE you? What are you doing here?”

“What are ANY of us doing here?”

It’s in Pfeiffer’s nosiness, poking around the big, rambling house, judging the wife for not yet having a child.

“Have kids. Then you’ll be creating something together,” she purrs. And looking at the massive hands-on one-woman renovation project they live in, she delivers her one big spoiler.

“All this is just…setting.”

Thus does every contrived conflict, every arbitrary, dictated-by-story-demands character entrance (Stephen McHattie plays the “zealot” leader of the poet’s mob of fans), every plot twist and bizarre taste of the surreal and supernatural, every blast of violence, make sense. It’s how a writer writes, starting with the familiar, abandoning it for the new.

“Mother!” is a plunge into the creative mind as viewed by the first character/central protagonist created by that mind, the loved-one closest to that creator, the one most necessary to the process yet the one most assured of getting hurt.

Aronofsky toys with the artist’s relationship with his fans and his muse/lover in this morbid plunge into the maelstrom of creation, the jewel-like rarity of that new idea that starts the process, the need to lose that jewel or abandon this or that familiar character to start anew, and the baggage that comes with success — fame, responsibilities to characters you’ve created, and to your fans.

It’s all a little grad school Creative Writing in its symbolism and subtexts writ so large that no amount of surface mayhem can hide them. It’s more engrossing than terrifying, horrific instead of simply scary.

But Lawrence, comfortably ensconced on the middle ground between the sexy Oscar winner she is and the put-upon overmatched “girl” that clings to her, makes her confusion and rising terror a tour de force, giving her most harowing performance in the process.

And if their love-match horror movie doesn’t find an audience and the whole dating an artist thing doesn’t work out, at least she’ll still have “Mother!” to look back on for Aronofsky’s explanation for the way these things go. The muse, all too often, is the odd woman (or man) out.

MPAA Rating:R for strong disturbing violent content, some sexuality, nudity and language

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kristen Wiig, Domhnall Gleeson

Credits: Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. A Paramount release.

Running time: 2:01

The best cast Guillermo del Toro’s ever worked with headlines his government secrets/monster movie period piece “The Shape of Water,” due out this Dec.

Sally Hawkins and Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon and Richard Jenkins — that’s a lineup any Academy Awards telecast would be proud to pitch as nominees.

“Creature from the Black Lagoon Shipped to Area 51” seems to be the plot. Studied, and then broken out. “Black Lagoon Meets ‘Turtle Diary,'” maybe?

Looks good. GDT could use a dazzler. The red band is purely for profanity, so don’t get your pervy hopes up.

Gather round, children, and let the Old Man of the Movies tell you the way it used to be in the simmering cinematic summers of the Old South.

Movie theaters were the first public spaces, nationwide, to invest in air conditioning, and back in Olden Times, they’d advertise that. It was another way to lure people out of the house (pre-AC) and away from the Boob Tube in those steamy “Body Heat” summers of yore.

AC pre-dated the cinema’s 1950s innovations to compete with TV — wider screens, broader use of color, stereophonic sound. And in a pinch, it’s what draws people back in, even today.

If you live in America’s Climate Changed Hurricane Zones, where “Harvey” rained and rained and “Irma” couldn’t make up her mind which half of Florida to ruin, you know what I mean.

Much of Florida, including where I live, is without power. No ice. No TV. No wi-fi. No AC. Just sultry, humid nights filled with the din of portable generators, groaning under a 24-7 load that is now into its fifth day. I’m writing this in a public library, grateful that their AC works and that my notebook PC hasn’t succumbed to the Deep Sea level of humidity.

#dukeenergyisanoxymoron.

So last night, I talked the GF into checking in to our local multiplex, where the one thing I could recommend that she hadn’t seen and I wouldn’t mind seeing again (already seen “Dunkirk” three times, so really — enough.) was “Wind River.”

The movie’s been out for a month. It was a Wednesday night, the second slowest night of the movie-going week. And the Epic Theaters in Deltona (not quite Daytona, not really DeLand), Fla., was packed.

AC. Glorious air conditioning. Cold drinks. With ice. You’d think a state ruled by Gov. Voldemort would be well-supplied by his iciness — and he’s running to become Senator Voldemort, too. But no.

So let’s see a picture set in the frozen wilds of Wyoming. Nothing like ice and snow to make you forget “It’s not the heat, it’s the HUMIDITY.” When actually, it’s both. Worked when my parents dragged me to “Dr. Zhivago” as a child, works today.

“River” is maybe the second best movie I’ve seen this year, even though you never quite get the blizzard the picture promises, even though characters never seem as cold (no visible breath) as they claim to be.

But the action beats are fearsome, the characters fascinating — especially the Reservation police chief, played by the whimsically deadpan Graham Greene — and the dialogue flinty and quotable.

“Luck don’t live out here.”

And over a month into its run, the audience I saw it with? They were more varied than I’ve seen at the movies in some time. People who don’t go out to the movies any more will make the effort when the house is hot and starting to smell like Rocky’s old gym shorts.

Whatever Irma and Harvey did to Florida and Texas when they blew in, I dare say most of the movie theaters that have re-opened in those states are setting records. I’m not even sore that the lunks releasing “American Assassin” and “Mother!” chose not to preview them here. I get a double feature tonight, something to take my mind off “Duke sucks, and not just during basketball season.”

Another theater, a few hours’ respite from the heat, a place to “chill” before that became a thing — just like the old days.

Sometimes, an indie film’s pedigree is far more interesting than the movie itself, and so it is with “Alina,” an inconsequential Russian immigrant lured into “personal escort” work by the support system she leans on upon arriving in New York.

It was written and directed by Ben Barenholtz, a seminal figure in the indie cinema  who branched out from running a New York art house theater to producing films such as “Miller’s Crossing,” “Requiem for a Dream” and “Georgia” for filmmakers such as the Coen Brothers, Darren Aronofsky and Ulu Grosbard.

He hit 80 before he decided “What I really want to do is direct,” and “Alina” is very much an old man’s movie — “edgy” in a 1970s way, with archetypal characters summoned up as distant, dated memories. Ethnic stereotypes give way to lurid slices of the night club sex trade, letting the picture veer into dirty old man’s movie territory.

The title character, played as an open book by Darya Ekamasova of TV’s “The Americans,” tells her mother she’s leaving for a trip to Cuba. Mom doesn’t know Alina’s plan is the leave the ashes of socialism behind altogether and make her way to New York.

She is to meet an old friend in the city, but first, she stops in a friendly looking eatery — The Russian Samovar. That’s where Maria (Olga N. Bogdanova) is the first countrywoman to offer her greetings — “Welcome to this crazy city!” — advice — “Come, we must speak ENGLISH!” — and help. She can hook her up as a waitress.

The old friend (Anna Vlads) is a “model,” and has the glamorous wardrobe befitting her claimed place in the world. But “model” is a loose term in these quarters. Alina has to be on her guard if she doesn’t want to live down to the stereotype — “All Russian girls are gold-diggers.”

But she isn’t on her guard, and things turn ugly quickly, with unscrupulous club-owners, proffered “energy” pills and “model” cocktail waitresses coaxing Alina into doing whatever it takes to get that dough-re-mi.

Barenholtz tries that old “Moscow on the Hudson” trick of making a New York that’s entirely comprised of immigrants. The Russians have their stereotypes to live down to. But there’s always an Italian family living up to its cliches to balance the scales in such movies.

It’s a short drama that lurches through assorted abrupt changes in tone, temperament and relationships.  Alina veers from overwhelmed and puzzled to outraged to smitten in 90 minutes as she tries to maintain her identity and finish her secret task.

No, she’s not a spy or a fake news peddler. The “mystery” isn’t that interesting.

Nor is the movie, with its over-familiar and limited view of the immigrant bubble Alina experiences, and her reactions to “crazy city” where Russian “girls” pan for gold in all the old familiar ways.

There would certainly have been a time that Barenholtz would have booked a movie like this, in English and Russian with English subtitles, in his NYC “indie” cinema. But it’s not to “Alina’s” credit that this time would have been about 1978, the last year this subject with this sort of treatment would  have felt original or “independent.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with explicit sexual situations, drug use

Cast: Darya Ekamasova, Olga N. Bogdanova, David Atrakchi,Grisha Reydler

Credits:Written and directed by Ben Barenholtz. A Super 80 release.

Running time: 1:29

Hurricanes Harvey and Irma didn’t dampen turnout for Stephen King’s “It,” which almost doubled pre-release projections to open with almost $117 million on its opening weekend.

No stars, a second adaptation of a book turned into a TV mini series in the early ’90s (Spike TV re-ran that this weekend), and it still made more in one weekend than the summer hit “Annabelle: Creation” has made in over a month of release.

Warner Brothers spent their money smartly, and it paid off.

Reese Witherspoon’s “Home Again” has managed about $9 million, not the epic bomb it seemed when Sat. AM dawned.

“Wind River” is now over $25 million, thanks to another Top Ten weekend.

“Hitman’s Bodyguard” is over $65 million.

For a movie critic, stumbling across a “new to Netflix” release you haven’t seen or even heard of is an “Uh oh” moment — for the film’s stars.

“We’re No Animals,” the last and least title conjured up for an ad hoc Argentinian aggregation of stars, a script that insists it is “no script” and plenty of random observations about art, the Argentinian soul and Argentinian history, didn’t get an American release.

It’s not even listed on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, as nobody bothered to review it (maybe at Cannes, but the reviews aren’t linked). At least IMDb has its credits. 

Because it was unreleaseable, an Argentinian attempt at making a Fellini film from the Argentinian director Alejandro Agresti, of “Valentin” and the somber Keanu/Bullock fantasy romance “The Lake House.”

He directs and also plays Patrick Pesto, an “artist” whose pitch has so intrigued a movie star’s agent (Al Pacino) that he’s burned through several cell phone calls convincing that star, Tony (John Cusack) to do the film. Tony, in turn is sold,  and his musician and writer friends (Paul Hipp, Kevin Morris) have joined him in Argentina for the filming.

But the pretentious, philosophical Pesto (Agresti, remember) has no script. He’s no filmmaker. “Do you think we even need cameras? To film this? Or can it just happen?”

He’s a painter, perhaps a poet, and a master BS artist — he allows that he’s seen Hollywood films — “Pillow (Talk) something or other. That ‘Best Years’ movie with the guy with no hands (“Best Years of Our Lives”).

And over the course of a long idyll with Pesto, Tony and his mates hit cafes and bars, sleep with women, make music.

Cusack’s Tony expresses dismay, surprise, enthusiasm and curiosity about this land where the natives declare “We cannot get over events that happened 35 years ago.”

People disappeared. Beautiful women they sit and talk with in an Argentinian restaurant in LA mention “My parents met in a concentration camp.”

“One more time?” is the only comeback Tony can manage for that. He has to go to this country, so Italian, so soulful, so Latin American — and experience this for himself and make a movie with a sort of broader poetic point about the land of the tango’s tortured psyche.

And as he does, Cusack wears an almost omnipresent black baseball cap. That’s been a trademark, a crutch, in a lot of awful films he’s taken simply for a check and a little travel — “Arsenal,” “Drive Hard” and others. You see the black baseball cap hiding the black dye job and receding hairline, you know Cusack’s taking a flier, present but not really present.

However daring the intent, the challenge of making a movie that’s not remotely a movie in homage to Fellini, with naked starlets impersonating the REAL Evita — Eva Peron — the ugly Latin sexism that pops up, here and there, the brutality of the past — “We’re No Animals” is — like its title, an apology, an attempt at self-justification and self-defense.

But Cusack, at 50, is a bad poker player who can’t help showing his hand, what he really thinks of this lark. He does it with that black baseball cap.

Cast: John Cusack, Al Pacino, Alejandro Agresti, Paul Hipp, Kevin Morris.

Credits: Written and directed by Alejandro Agresti.

Running time: 1:30

I had the same doubts about Jason Zinoman’s “The Last Giant of Late Night” Letterman biography that I had about his New York Timesman predecessor Bill Carter’s “The Late Shift.” That is that the book starts out with the same erroneous New York-centric take that Carter’s concluded with.

Carter’s book, later made into a TV movie, ended with Letterman leaving NBC after much melodrama, launching his show on CBS, and becoming King of Late Night. Carter implied that this would be the way it was going to be until Letterman, like Carson, took his leave from the public airwaves.

And as history shows, that didn’t last. Not at all. The audience wearied of Letterman’s brand of irony in months, not decades. He bungled the Oscars, Leno landed Hugh Grant post Divine Brown.

And Letterman, aside from occasionally crushing Conan O’Brien when NBC gave him “The Tonight Show,” was rarely relevant again — post 9-11, by default, post-heart attack, and later admitting on air that he was a serial philanderer subject to blackmail.

So “Last Giant of Late Night?” Not so much.

But I enjoyed Zinoman’s (comedy columnist for the Times) approach. He watched thousands of hours of Letterman’s shows. He talked with the man and a lot of his staff, including those he systematically froze-out (he hated the confrontation of firing somebody) over the decades.

He connects with signature memorable moments of the show, fixates on Letterman’s love of language and word play, weighs in on what others called Letterman’s chilliness, his Indiana xenophobia (he loved “funny sounding” foreign names, part of that word play, too much). Zinoman touches on the sarcasm that crossed into cruelty in interviews, the sneering Harvard frat boy writer’s room style of humor that mocked Larry “Bud” Melman (Calvert DeForest) and others.

He connects Letterman, “the broadcaster,” with Howard Stern, an old friend with whom he shared an irreverence for celebrities and a lust for leering at starlets.

Zinoman deconstructs a series of AM and PM shows that deconstructed themselves, and traces as well he can Letterman’s inspirations — from Robert Benchley onward.

He tries to debunk “the Oscar myth” (Letterman is the one who insisted he bombed, and was right — lots of TV critics failed to get that). He lays out the years of Letterman NBC slights, insults and simple person-to-person rudeness that cost him “The Tonight Show” job. Letterman, like Conan, likes to milk his version of that “done me wrong” story, which some fans still swallow whole.

And Zinoman captures the long, lazy fall — an out-of-touch curmudgeon who disconnected from the writing staff, refused to rehearse, refused to leave the desk for remotes, refused to put in any effort — for years and YEARS. “Irony is dead” may not have done Letterman in. Phoning it in did.

Letterman the Man comes off as a leaning tower of insecurities, quick to lash out at others, quicker to ignore any triumph and absorb every failure as a personal character flaw. Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show” experience is correctly brought up as the perfect parallel to Letterman’s psyche, petulance and attempted “bored with it all” style. He just lacked Parr’s sophistication and curiosity, as indeed every late night host who followed has.

It’s a good book, even if Harper Collins editors didn’t do Zinoman a lot of favors. Letterman was a middling stand-up, and the “comedy columnist” is out of his depth talking about broadcasting, which is how Letterman labeled himself — “broadcaster.” Letterman’s early days mid-day radio show is labeled “drive-time,” when it wasn’t, Zinoman confuses Boris Karloff with Bela Lugosi (Ed Wood’s muse in “Plan Nine from Outer Space”), asserts that pro-wrestling during the Andy Kaufman era was “covered like a real sport” (never ever happened) and hits you with one of these blunders every few pages.

He gives shorter shrift than he should to the ways Letterman copied and updated others’ TV “innovations,” the wacky on-the-street bits Steve Allen did are mentioned, the proto-surrealism of Ernie Kovacs that plainly inspired other running gags is missed.

Letterman repaying Tom Snyder, whose time slot he grabbed at NBC, with a “later” show is detailed. Craig Ferguson, the best “talker” of the lot, who replaced Snyder, is not.

But here’s Chris Elliott, son of a Big Letterman Influence, Bob Elliott of “Bob & Ray,” weaseling his way on the air, and there’s the office worker Meg Parsont, courted by phone on late night TV by a host who could come off creepy because plainly he was and is, when it comes to women — leering, clumsily flirting, subjecting starlets to decades of innuendo.

That over-arching thesis, “Last King,” is an easy over-reach, too. You may not like Leno, who is probably worthy of a thorough bio of this sort as well. Leno didn’t do his show from New York, was more plebeian and conservative and was hated by many a stand-up comic for his one-upsmanship. The Times sided with Letterman from the start. But Leno beat Letterman handily in audience appeal, innovated almost as much, and endured merciless criticism over “stealing” “The Tonight Show” from first Letterman, and then from Conan, neither of whom thrived in that hour of the night.

Colbert and Fallon are ably following in all their footsteps, innovating the format as much as Letterman or Leno or O’Brien ever did. That undercuts the “Last King” thesis, as well.

Letterman comes off as the worst near-stranger to have a beer with. Leno, in impressions formed outside of the book, always bulls through to a punch-line, even now on “Jay Leno’s Garage,” and would wear one out in person and turn annoying in short order. O’Brien just isn’t as clever as he’s always thought he was and has a tedium about him that makes him worth only small doses of your time.

All seem like insecure, guarded and selectively-revealing funnymen who only truly exist for that TV limelight.

Truthfully, the reclusive Johnny Carson was probably the “Last King of Late Night.” You still hear old stories about him, and his growing laziness, greed and arrogance (Needed for him to be able to deal with NBC, but not showing up and always lightening his workload?) is touched on, here. He wanted to anoint his successor, something Letterman had the good sense to avoid. There’s a last lesson Carson inadvertently taught them all, the true “Last King” leaving that as a legacy. The King doesn’t get to pick the next King.

But who’d read a book about him?

Consider this. Horror movies typically have a box office ceiling, which the “Conjuring/Insidious” and more recently “Annabelle” folks have pushed against.

Consider too, that Stephen King’s brand is 40 years old and his track record with film adaptations has been spotty, if not downright cursed. Add to that the fact that “Dark Tower” bombed and “Mr. Mercedes” is on TV right now and he’s once again over-exposed.

Throw in two inanimate horrors named “Harvey” and “Irma,” which all but take two huge states off the box office table, suppressing turnout at the movies this weekend.

And damned if “It” isn’t blowing up records, left and right, on its opening days in theaters. Projections ranged from the $60s to the $80s. But Deadline.com says that thanks to huge Thursday night numbers, and an epic Friday, the clown-in-the-sewer thriller might hit $101 million for the weekend. A horror movie opening weekend record, a fall (not holiday) record, a record for R-rating thrillers, etc. 

I was sure the hurricanes were going to suppress turnout, but nope.

R-rated, horror, a remake of a TV miniseries and a tried and generally not true branded writer, and Hollywood is probably wishing this thing had opened last month. If might have saved a sinking summer. Reviews, if anything, helped that along. 

Reese Witherspoon entrusted her big screen comeback to reliable “women’s picture” queen Nancy Meyers’ daughter. Reviews were brutal, and the picture — with a lot of no-name love interests (and Michael Sheen and Candace Bergen) in support, SERIOUSLY unoriginal and unfunny Hollywood observations about Hollywood types — those “types” cast with an onslaught of boring, charisma-starved players, and damned if it isn’t sputtering out.

Not totally bombing, but $8-9 million? That’s a “Back to cable with you, Ms. W.” message. And for Hollywood, a reminder that nepotism is the mendacious mark of mediocrity. 

Hollywood is famous for its short collective memory. But they have reason to want to forget last summer. In box office terms, it was chilling, a near disaster, a “What’s the future of this business?” level fall-off.  Historically bad, a break-the-movie-going habit warning that better, more varied pictures are a must.

So what can save them? A remake of a Stephen King mini-series. “It” has been expected to pull in over $60 million and pull Tinseltown’s bacon out of the fire.

And even though there’s a hurricane that will wipe out Florida’s receipts, starting Saturday (go tonight, kids!), Box Office Mojo is predicting an $85 million opening.

It is almost certain to set a new fall opening record. But that’s got to be too high, right? Florida and the Southeast are braced for a hurricane, a big chunk of Texas is closed for repairs. How can they hit $85?

They can’t, says the Box Office Guru. $62, says he. 

Reviews have been quite good for this “Stand by Me” with a sewer luring clown. Really, it’s no better or worse than most King horror fiction, derivative — obvious — but not bad counts as pretty good.  

And horror has proven to have a pretty firm ceiling. Not everybody wants to see a scary movie, not many want to see their clown nightmares on the big screen.

Reese Witherspoon needs a hit to keep her film career relevant. She make pull in $12 million worth of fans for “Home Again,” which is getting awful reviews — deservedly so. That’s what Box Office Mojo thinks the picture will do. Again, Florida and Texas are out of play, so lower bets are safer. Box Office Mojo figures $8.5 — maybe.

Take your typical Nancy Meyers wish-fulfillment romantic comedy — “Something’s Gotta Give” or “It’s Complicated,” say. Rub anything resembling an edge off, and rob it of any charismatic turns by stars such as Diane Keaton, Robert DeNiro (“The Intern”) or Meryl Streep.

And what you’d get is “Home Again,” a Reese Witherspoon turns-40 farce without laughs, a second-chance love, whiter-than-whitebread “Osca-winner gets her groove back” blend of “Entourage” and, oh, “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”

This Hallie Meyers-Shyer comedy – yes, she’s Nancy’s daughter with longtime husband and collaborator Charles Shyer (“Baby Boom,” “Father of the Bride”) — is so bad it brings to mind every withering put-down of Hollywood nepotism summed up by one lethal 1930s Variety headline about Louis B. Mayer putting the fellow who married his daughter in charge of MGM.

“The Son-in-Law Also Rises.”

Because everything about this newly-separated MILF coveted by three film school bros trying to break into Hollywood screams “old” and “insipid,” and hell, apple-falls-just-a-smidge-too-far from-the-tree.

Hallie has concocted a white Tyler Perry comedy of the post-Madea years, lovely monochromatic people, toned, made-up, coiffed and attired to the hilt for their high-end restaurants and tony picnics, vapid as all get out, but still capable of tiny stand-alone moments of profundity.

“At some point, I have to know better,” Witherspoon’s Alice Kinney, daughter of the late, great director John Kinney says — to herself, to the 27 year-old would-be director Harry (Pico Alexander) she’s bedded after inviting him and his wannabe an actor brother (Nat Wolff) and screenwriting partner George (Josh Stamberg) to move into the insanely-tasteful rambling Mission-revival house she inherited from her father.

Alice has two kids, a soon-to-be-ex-husband in the music business (Michael Sheen, giving fair value as always) and an ex-starlet mom (Candace Bergen).

Naturally, the children are smart-mouths of the sitcom variety, a Brooke Shields/Cara Delevigne-eyebrows tween just waiting for her first runway job and begging for “anti-depressants, just like every other kid my age” and an all-understanding New York sophisticated littler girl of six.

Grandma (Bergen) is over her “Lola In Between” stardom and the cheating husband who fathered Alice.

“I’m a big girl, now. And he’s dead. So I win.”

Alice? She’s weepy but plucky, pulling herself together, moving back home from NYC to start a design/decorating business for the insufferable rich (Lake Bell, inexplicably taking the name of famed stunt-woman Zoe Bell for her character).

But when Alice’s central casting clatch of ready-made “old friends” throw her a birthday dinner, she gets tipsy and succumbs to Harry’s charms — until he, unable to handle his liquor, throws up.

That leads to “when I was your age” cracks, and a lot of warm, matriarchal touches (she lets the three stay-over, and washes their clothes — “I was doing a load, anyway.”). That leads her mom to be flattered into inviting them to stay.

So Alice has a sitcommy house full of on-the-make lads trying to get a film made, (legions of colorless agents, producers to meet) but doubling as live-in babysitters, kid-taxi drivers, tech support, handymen and would-be lovers.

Until the not-quite-ex gets wind of this menage.

Hallie Meyers Shyer’s writing gift is cooking up compliments for her blase supporting players to give her star.

“You have an ‘I’ve got this’ about you that’s pretty impressive.”

Her directing style is to hold shots –mostly TV comedy styled close-ups — entirely too long — giving every player, even those old enough to know better — the chance to add a second, third and fourth facial gesture to her or his reaction.

Witherspoon & Co. make this feel like a late night walk through 1970s Central Park. You can’t make any headway for all the mugging. Compare her work in this to cable’s “Big Little Lies,” and see the trap “I just want to be LOVED again” movie stars let themselves fall into.

It’s the dullest movie about Tinseltown in decades, an irritating film full of irritating performances and maddeningly stupid scenes about the meeting mania that any potential film goes through. Casting a dull kid named after an LA street — Pico Alexander — is as on-the-nose and over-familiar as every ad nauseam observation about her hometown and the privileged bubble Meyers Shyer grew up in.

The age-old Hollywood tradition of passing on one’s work and place in the film food chain to one’s offspring — buying Junior or Junior Miss a credit — can sometimes seem appropriate. Jason Reitman’s “Magic Surname” career started well, even if the death-spiral that followed makes one question its wisdom.

But something about this film, this “legacy” career, makes “Home Again” an apt statement in the current political climate, where the mendacious mediocrity of nepotism is laid bare by the international laughingstock who occupies — with his not-exactly-MENSA offspring — the Oval Office.

Witherspoon? At some point, she had to know better.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some thematic and sexual material

Cast: Reese Witherspoon, Michael Sheen, Pico Alexander, Nat Wolff, Candace Bergen, Lake Bell.

Credits: Written and directed by Hallie Meyers Shyer. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:35